Abstract Art

"Eight Million Stories in the Naked City," an exhibition of narrative works, christens the new year at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Jan. 9 to Feb. 8. The exhibition focuses on photography by Lisa Bloomfield, Douglas Huebler and Barbara Kruger, drawings by Anetta Kapon and an installation by Linda Nishio. Curator Elaine Wintman selected the artists. Meanwhile, LACE's show of experimental video works, titled "Video and Language: Video as Language," continues.

William Brice, an artist best known for grand-scale abstract paintings that suggest fragments of ancient classical ruins, has died. He was 86. Brice, who also was an influential art teacher at UCLA for decades, died Monday at UCLA Medical Center, according to Kimberly Davis, director of L.A. Louver Gallery, which represents him. Davis said the exact cause of death was not known but that Brice had recently taken a fall, hit his head and never regained...

It's a rare thing in the Southland to see a survey of native abstract art that is as hip, scholarly, comprehensive and concise as the one just opened at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. Rather stuffily titled "American Abstraction From the Addison Gallery of American Art," it still manages to function as a brilliantly clear short lecture on the essence of the form delivered by the world's best teachers, the works themselves.

"Abstract art remains misunderstood by the majority of the viewing public. Most people, in fact, consider it meaningless," Maurice Tuchman writes in the exhibition catalogue of "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985." If the show that Tuchman has organized to inaugurate the County Museum of Art's Robert O. Anderson Building has its desired effect, abstract art will gain a more discerning audience.

Jim Isermann's quietly dazzling weavings at Richard Telles Fine Art rank among the best works this multitalented artist has made over his impressively diverse career. Beautifully crafted and intelligently conceived, these handmade works are as humble as dishrags, yet they do the job of the most high-minded abstract art. Isermann's approximately four-foot-square plaids, stripes and zig-zags hang casually against the wall, like relaxed, off-duty paintings.

Ed Mieczkowski, 68, is part of the second generation of American abstract artists--the ones whose paths were smoothed by decades-earlier battles against the ignorance and scorn of a public firmly wedded to representational art. Yet the compact, genial man from Cleveland who was strolling through the Laguna Art Museum in a playfully hand-painted hat the other day began reminiscing about his own struggles while ostensibly discussing an exhibition of 60 works by artists active in the '30s and '40s.

Frank Gehry was in his hometown of Toronto on Monday to reveal his conceptual designs for a multiyear transformation of the city's downtown arts and entertainment district. The architect is teaming with Canadian theater producer David Mirvish, whose sizable art collection will receive a new home as part of the massive endeavor. The mixed-used project will include three high-rise residential towers soaring from 80 to 85 stories and a new facility for the Ontario College of Art & Design University.